Older adults show overexaggerated and larger noise-related degradation in their neural tracking of speech

Background: Speech-in-noise (SIN) perception is a difficult everyday listening task that becomes more difficult with age. Neural tracking of target speech is associated with successful speech perception in clean and noise-degraded listening environments. How aging impacts neural tracking of speech and relates to behavioral decrements in older adults' SIN perception remains unclear. To address these questions, we measured neural speech tracking during a continuous SIN perception task in younger and older adults via multichannel EEG. Method: Participants (n=83) monitored a continuous stream of syllables (~4.5 Hz) presented in quiet and noise conditions during EEG recordings. We assessed neural phase-locking value (PLV) to the acoustic speech envelope to investigate interactions between aging, hearing loss, and stimulus noise on neural synchronization to speech. Results: Compared to younger adults, older adults demonstrated less behavioral sensitivity to noise effects than young adults and had higher overall PLV to target speech. Older adults also showed greater noise-related degradations in neural speech processing relative to younger listeners. Age remained a strong predictor of behavioral responses to speech even after controlling for hearing loss. Covarying for hearing loss removed most age-related effects on neural PLV. Conclusion: Older adults demonstrate overexaggerated neural tracking to ongoing speech presented in quiet and greater noise-related reductions in neurobehavioral speech processing than young adults. Our results support the decline-compensation hypothesis, corroborate unusually large speech envelope encoding in older listeners, and suggest more robust neural synchronization to the speech signal is not always perceptually advantageous.